


I Am Not the Same

by elithewho



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ADWD spoilers, Apocalypse, Dragons, F/M, Gen, Magic, Resurrection, Sexual Content, like jesus in a way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-08
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-05 00:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elithewho/pseuds/elithewho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It gets dark and then, I feel certain I am going to rise again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am Not the Same

_It gets dark and then  
I feel certain I am going to rise again  
If not by faith then by the sword  
I'm going to be restored_  
\-- The Mountain Goats, Hebrews 11:40

 

He lived in the action of the kill. The hot blood filling his mouth, spilling over his teeth, the frantic heartbeat reverberating and then dying in the torn neck of the deer. He shredded flesh, filled his belly with hot blood and his thoughts were consumed by hunger.

But there was a burning beyond that familiar pain. He felt it in his insides, in his bones. He tossed his head, pawing the frozen earth, trying to shake away the feeling. There was a fire inside him. He whined as the pain grew more intense. He snarled helplessly, rearing and darting blindly. His sated belly rebelled and rejected the hard won meal, spilling steaming meat onto the snow.

The fire was in his brain. His vision was black with shadow. His powerful legs gave way and he sunk onto the earth.

 

Waking. There was heat. He tasted blood. Everything burned.

His thoughts were too disordered to comprehend what was happening. He opened his eyes and was immediately blinded by flickering light. There was fire there, and the word _fire_ came to him with sudden understanding. He had no language. His thoughts were action: the hunt and the kill, the peaceful rest. No. He was not a wolf.

He tried to say it, to make it true. He was not a wolf, but he had been. He had stalked the deer, broken its neck and tasted the hot blood spilling into his mouth, the sinews tearing beneath powerful jaws. He had understood the world through sound and smell and a blur of colorless shape.

He was a man. He had language and thought. He had a name.

He struggled to remember. The wolf had no use for remembering. It existed purely in the moment and the pull of instinct. Now his memories felt locked away, beyond a dark and forbidding wall. Someone was singing.

It was a woman’s voice. It sounded like the flicker of flame against a stone hearth. He forced his eyes open again, fighting through the sting of sharp light which seemed to push his eyes deep into his skull. He raised his arms and every muscle felt like it had never been used. He flexed his hands clumsily and it was incredible to have fingers again, to feel each individual joint.

He could see now, the blurred shape of his hands. His skin was sickly pale like it had been rotting underwater. The singing was so close now and he perceived a shape against the firelight. She was all red.

 

The red filled his mind. He was thirsty and hungry all the time, but the sensations were curiously dulled. Beer was poured down his throat and it was still raw. He felt meat in his mouth and it was thick and leathery but it seemed utterly tasteless.

Red. All his thoughts were red. It was as though the red shape and the red voice lived inside him like an illness, always lurking.

Most times he was alone. When he walked, it was with the stiff, fumbling movements of a sleepwalker. More and more memories were surfacing, as though they had been living underwater for years. He once sat at that chair and slept in that bed and he could recall each moment clearly, the urgency and anxiety he had felt. He recognized the emotions, but felt separate from them, as though they had happened to someone else.

He wasn’t as he was. His body felt frozen and stiff and he was cold all the time even next to a blazing fire. There were blotchy purple pockmarks covering his body. They seemed to lead to some deep crevasse in his skin, but they remained bloodless. He feared touching them, exploring them, because when his fingers ghosted over the furrowed skin, he felt the memory of pain.

In his dreams he saw white snow and grey sky. He saw red hair, bright as wild carrots, the comforting smell of a wood fire. He saw a white tree with a red face and heard the clear and lively sound of children laughing. He saw the sharp edges of glittering blades, sliding through the air with alarming swiftness, sinking into his skin, the flash of light leaving afterimages on his eyelids.

Sometimes he went outside. He remembered the way very easily, as though he had traversed it all his life. He had no clothes, but he never met another person. He stood outside in the snow, the sky dominated by ice, searching for stars. He told himself if he found stars, it would be comforting. He never did. When the snow fell all around him, he saw it fall upon the broken piles of wood and stone, etching out an outline of the place in the eternal darkness. He never saw the sun.

 

Then the red woman came. She entered his room and his nose was full of sulfur and burning smoke. She was as naked as he was and her nipples stood out, red and angry. Her hair fell around her face like strips of bloody sinew, the smooth expanse of her face was blue as shadow. She touched his feet, the cracked and nerveless skin, his chest and his groin, the sides of his face. Her touch was burning hot, searing him, but it could not thaw his icy core.

When she drew his cock inside her, the feeling was like peering over the edge of a cliff and not seeing the bottom. It racked his body with sensation and memory, of firelight flickering on a cave’s wall, the gamey smell of animal furs and the heady taste of a girl’s mouth. The red woman’s touch was hard and ungentle, her nails with like razors sliding over his skin, her mouth a terrible set of shining white teeth. She sang as she rode him, her voice like the sharp edge of a knife. He emptied himself inside her and it felt like she was pulling something out of him, some part of him she was absorbing into her own body. He felt the presence of shadow, singing the edge of his vision.

The red woman was panting, her face shining with sweat. “The night is dark and full of terrors,” she said, her voice ghosting over him like an unwelcome touch. The glittering red eye glowing at the hollow of her throat was emitting light and heat like a burning ember. Beads of sweat slipped down the valley of her breasts.

 

He existed in a valley of his own thoughts. He could not climb out from either direction. Words moved through his head like prayers, but he could hardly grasp the meaning. _Jonsnow jonsnow jonsnow._ It echoed like a single word. _You know nothing, Jon Snow._ He sensed a pink and curving mouth repeating the words. The ghost of some passion and pain flared in his heart at the memory. But he could barely hold onto it, like a handful of water running between his fingers.

Jon Snow the man seemed as distant to him as the arching sky. He could also remember being a wolf, the sharp senses and the fierce power of his jaws, the wild freedom of running, his strong legs bearing him over the snow with exhilarating speed. He felt weak and dull by comparison.

“I’m dead,” he said to the empty, snow-filled void. He was sure of it, now. The memory of dying was growing clearer every day. He had felt the certainty of death, the coldness stealing over his body. It had never left him.

He walked the ruined castle. He recalled all the things that had happened there with vivid clarity, but they continued to exist behind a transparent veil and he could not get at the truth of them. Why was he dead? The answer evaded him like a spooked deer.

He repeated his name again and again. _Jon Snow Jon Snow Jon Snow._ He was always cold, but it hardly troubled him. He wondered if the cold would ever snuff out the sputtering spark of life that had returned to him. Sometimes he hoped it would.

 

He woke to smoke and heat. He thought the fire in his hearth had overflowed, but it sat as a glowing patch of embers. He felt the heat radiating from his walls like his room had become an oven, and smoke poured through the cracks in the door, obscuring his vision in a searing fog.

He stumbled to his feet, coughing, wheezing, sharp pains leaping from his chest and shooting through every limb. There were sounds like screaming from outside the door, but not any kind of screaming he had ever imagined.

Before he could reach the door, it was torn from its hinges. Fire clung to the frame. The woman standing there may have been a ghost. Her hair was lightning white, her skin the color of crisp snow. She was naked, a few bits of singed fabric clinging to her frame and the blackened metal belt around her slender waist. Her nipples were high and pink and her pubic hair was same blazing white as her skin, shining like a patch of new snow.

“You’re him,” she said. Her voice rang like the clanging of a bell. “The last Targaryen.”

He couldn’t process her words. They sounded like a foreign language, though he was sure he understood the individual meanings. He took a step forward.

There was a sound like a great bellows being compressed and searing hot air rushed into the room, tossing her glowing hair around her face. He sensed something behind her, some creature made from fire but emitting no light.

She was emanating heat. She was a pillar of white flame and when he touched her, her skin was smooth and dry as bone. The metal belt perhaps had once been gold, but it was blackened by fire and the superheated metal left a ring of angry red burns on her skin. Her eyes were purple, so intense and vibrant that he was sure he had never truly seen the color.

His hands touched her waist, as if to draw her into an embrace. He wanted to absorb her warmth. It seemed to pour from her like water, her skin was glowing from it. But it was not a light that illuminating anything, it seemed to suck light away from everything else, leaving it all in shadow. She held a dagger of glittering steel.

He felt the movement, the blade slicing his skin, but he could not feel it. Then it seemed as though the shadows around them moved like a phantom. It coalesced, and the woman merely raised a hand to it, as if to bat away a cloud of black smoke. The shadow looked like him. He recognized himself in the shape and in the feeling and he wanted to scream and tear away from it, but it was pressing against the woman like a lover. She barely reacted. The shadow gained sharpness and drew the tender flesh of her throat to it, claiming it in a kiss.

The blood that poured from her was not like blood. It was black and hot as molten lead. She did not make a sound, and crumpled before him, dropping like a doll. Her blood coated him, hot enough to burn. He stepped out into the night.

“The night is dark and full of terrors,” he told the air.

There was the black creature. He sensed the enormity of its shape, blotting out everything else. He saw its outline in the hard glitter of its body, the burning sockets of its eyes. As his vision adjusted to the darkness, he saw the long, reptilian snout, the flaring nostrils emitting curls of smoke like strands of hair. The creature opened its mouth and he was certain he was going to be engulfed in fire, burned to nothing but ash. He welcomed it.

But he merely felt the scorching hot air surround him like an embrace. He stared into the creature’s eyes, like glowing coals. The thing pressed its snout against his chest, inhaling with a great sucking sound. Perhaps it was the smell of its mistress’s blood which confused it. But he could sense intelligence in the creature’s eyes. This was no dumb beast.

“I’m dead,” he told it. There was no response but another blast of smoke.

Jon Snow reached out and grasped the dragon by its head. There was an ear splitting roar and it seemed to echo, again and again. Then he saw more dragons, illuminated by puffs of fire as they descended. Jon felt the black dragon move, shift its enormous body so that the smooth back was revealed to him. He saw the iridescent scales, the shifting light of fire. He climbed on.

He stared back, one more time, to his tower room. The dragon of radiant white and gold had torn a jagged hole where the doorframe had been. It laid its pearlescent wing over the body of the dead woman with surprising tenderness. The sound it made was distinctly sad.

_The last Targaryen._ The woman’s words echoed in his mind. It made no sense, no matter how hard he thought on it. But the dragon was rising like a vast cloud of smoke, soundless and swift. Jon looked up. He saw stars, winking serenely.

The heat of the dragon’s body was intense and he felt his skin blister at the contact, blazing fire penetrating his skin. But the center of his heart remained icy and hard.


End file.
